Sebastian Angel

Sebastian Angel is an Associate Professor and Chair of Undergraduate Curriculum in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He leads research in systems, security, privacy, and networking, with a focus on privacy-preserving systems, accountability in online services, consistency in distributed systems, and next-generation operating systems.

• Research Areas: Systems, Security, Privacy, Networking, Distributed Systems, Operating Systems
• Labs & Teams: Distributed Systems Laboratory, Security and Privacy Laboratory, Warren Center for Network and Data Sciences
• Education: Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin (2018), ACM SIGOPS Dennis M. Ritchie Dissertation Award, Bert Kay Best Dissertation Award

Recent Publications (2025–2022) span serverless computing, zero-knowledge proofs, distributed transactions, privacy-preserving ad tech, and verifiable execution. His 2025 work includes serverless workflow optimization and structural logic verification, while 2024 focuses on caching frameworks and stateful serverless. Earlier 2023–2022 projects include secure federated learning, confidential cloud services, and private information retrieval.

Scientific Awards:

• NSF CAREER Award (2021)
• JPMorgan Faculty Award (2021)
• ACM SIGOPS Dennis M. Ritchie Dissertation Award (2018)
• Bert Kay Best Dissertation Award (2018)
• ACM SIGMOD Research Highlights Award (2024)
• VLDB 2024 Best Paper Award Nominee

Advising:

• Current PhD Students: Elizabeth Margolin, Jess Woods, Yuxuan Zhang
• Current Masters Students: Felix Adena, Sydnie Shea Cohen
• Alumni: Eleftherios Ioannidis (2025), Yiping Ma (2025), Haoran Zhang (2024), Ke Zhong (2024), Selin Butun (2025), Martin Sander (2025), Seungmin Han (2024), Andrew Beams (2022), Yifeng Mao (2021), Varad Deshpande (2020)

Current Courses: CIS 4510/5510: Computer and Network Security (Fall 2025). He also organizes conferences like S&P, OSDI, SOSP, PETS, and EuroSys.